Solostream wordpress themes: A recommendation
If you have followed my blog or other parts of my domain for a while, you will have noticed that I change themes fairly often. What you may not know is that all of my themes come from the same vendor, namely a company called Solostream. They make premium themes for WordPress. I have used their themes for many years. The first time I got one of their themes was in June of 2007. Since then, they haven’t been able to get rid of me.
Those who follow my domains also know that there are no ads on my sites, and that I don’t make product recommendations either. But I’ll make an exception and write about the Solostream themes.
It might be a very feminine thing to want to change appearance constantly. Like changing dresses when the seasons change or when you see something you know you just have to have. At any rate, I strongly believe that content and layout go hand in hand. A good layout will enhance the presentation of my material. The texts can stand alone, but they stand better with a good layout. I also enjoy putting a personal Iskwew-touch on my sites.
For this purpose, the Solostream themes have shown to be very useful indeed.
First and foremost, the themes are nicely looking, flexible and well organised to begin with. Some of them, like the WP-vybe theme, I pretty much implemented as it was and got the look I wanted. Other themes I have customised beyond recognition. I change fonts and colours, shuffle around elements and get a very personal look.
Most of the newer Solostream themes come with an extensive theme settings page. You do not have to dive into the php-files to make a lot of changes to the look and feel of the theme. The themes also have their own demo sites with tutorials on how to set them up.
But the neatest thing with these themes is that they do not come equipped with just one css-file. They come with 3.
- style.css – The main stylesheet
- style.php – Picking up the styling from the theme settings page
- style-2.css – The file to put your very own personal styling
This means that you can pretty much keep the original stylesheet free of any personal changes. That’s a big advantage, as it makes it very easy to keep tabs on what changes you have done yourself, in case something breaks. You can just roll back any changes you have done, because they are very easy to find.
I think the stylesheets are very well organised, with clear headings making the different elements easy to find and work with. For those of us who are not coders, that’s a very important thing; clean, easy to overview simplicity is the way to go.
Currently I am using the theme WP-Foliotheme here on the homepage part of my domain. Check out the demo site for the theme to compare, and you’ll see that I have customised it at lot.
On the blog part of my domain, I am using WP-Prolific. It’s not customised as much, but you can see the difference when comparing to the demo site for the theme.
On Finans til folket, I am using the WP-Clear theme. Again, comparing to the demo site, it has a quite different look.
None of these customisations were very difficult to make, especially since Solostream has very good theme support. Most problems you cannot solve yourself can be solved by posting questions in the support forum.
As for pricing, I think the themes are reasonably priced compared to the quality you get. A basic liscence, which you can use on one site, usually costs $79. Paying that means you get both a nice looking, well organised theme and very good support. That’s well worth 79 dollars in my opinion.
So, if you don’t mind paying a little to get a great theme, my recommendation is to go check out the Solostream themes. I’m sure you find one which suits your needs, and I assure you, it’ll be easy to customise it so that it looks just like you want it.
If you have found this post because you already have a Solostream theme and searched for a solution to something, here’s my advice on how to get started:
If you have just bought a theme, there are a few things that is helpful before you start setting up the theme, and discover that you can’t get it to look as nice as the demo you saw.
Read the posts on the theme demo site for your chosen theme.
You will find all the basic information you need to start setting it up. There are a few things common on the demo sites. A get started post, listing any additional plugins you need, and how to do the basic things you need to do to get it working, and information about
Featured posts
Banner ads
etc.Reading those posts will get the theme basics up and going (and with Solostream themes, it’s not hard!)
Search the forums
You can either search the whole forum (if you are at the top level) or any of the underlying theme forums (if you are in one of those). What you are struggling with will most likely have been encountered by other Solostream theme users.
Ask in the forums
If you have read the theme demo site, and searched the forums, but still haven’t found the answer, you can ask in the forums. The Soloteam and associates (Martin) are very helpful and can pretty much solve almost everything. Or maybe other forum users have had the same issues and know the answers. Be patient and you will get an answer, at least that’s my experience.
When that’s solved, all you need to do, is to play around with colours in your theme settings page (for the themes that have those) or dive into your CSS.
But the main thing of course: Get your texts or images or other things you want to publicize out to the public
